In each police-related death recently dominating the headlines, authorities overreacted to black men’s behaviors as if they were life-threatening.

On Staten Island, an unarmed Eric Garner was wrestled to the ground by five police officers and strangled to death over selling loose cigarettes on the street. In Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown was gunned down after an altercation over walking in the street and under suspicion of stealing cigarillos from a convenience store. Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland, was shot within two seconds of police pulling up to the playground where he was playing with a toy gun, despite a 911 caller’s tip that it probably was a toy. And a famous self-appointed authority, George Zimmerman, shot unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin simply for walking through his gated community.

The common theme in these cases? An overreaction to a perceived threat of black criminality.

In a report issued in December by the Discipline Disparities Collaborative, a group of 26 expert researchers, educators, and child advocates (including ourselves), we found that the same dynamic is prevalent in schools, where authorities suspend and arrest black youth for minor misbehavior at alarming rates.

Young people of color are disciplined and punished excessively far too often for minor behaviors, with consequences lethal to their life prospects.

Federal data released in March 2014 show that black students are suspended at three times the rate of their white counterparts. Research from the collaborative reveals that these disparities routinely aren’t explained by more serious misbehavior by black and brown children: White children doing the same things often get less punitive consequences.

In both schooling and policing, then, young people of color—especially black girls and boys—are disciplined and punished excessively far too often for minor behaviors, with consequences lethal to their life prospects.

We see several shared dynamics at play.

First, according to research conducted by collaborative member Phillip Goff and his colleagues, Americans tend to perceive black boys as older and more culpable than they are. (Indeed, an officer thought 12 year-old Rice was about 20.) Police also use deadly force much faster and more often against black men in ambiguous situations that could easily be defused. And school data consistently show that youth of color are overwhelmingly suspended not for carrying weapons or drugs, but for subjective offenses like "defiance" or "insubordination" that require judgment calls and can fuel biased overreaction.

Second, as noted in the report from the collaborative, stereotypes as old as the U.S. slavery system, which enforced total social control over blacks, continue to frame African American males in particular as threats to order and safety. Emerging research on implicit bias shows the majority of Americans of all races continue to unconsciously associate black men with danger and criminality—and even apes. That Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown, described Brown to the grand jury as looking like a "demon" is a telling example of how black males are often perceived as hyper-threatening and even less than human.

Third, as noted in the report, because racial segregation in housing and schools remains the norm in the United States, many Americans (whether black, white, or brown) grow up with too little opportunity to form cross-racial relationships that might challenge the stereotypes. Although teachers and police interact across race lines more than people in many other professions, they rarely interact as equals with the people of color they serve. Instead, many commute into neighborhoods and schools as authority figures, often carrying a hyper-vigilant—if unconscious—fear of the people they are assigned to teach and protect.

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Notably, the country’s learning institutions have increasingly become venues for policing, as schools hire more security officers to patrol hallways and enforce discipline. The number of school-based security officers on campuses nationwide increased steadily between 1997 and 2003, with the number of so-called "school resource officers" climbing again since Sandy Hook—in part thanks to $45 million in federal aid to hire more school police. Studies are mixed on the effectiveness of police in making schools safer, but data does show that their presence actually increases the likelihood that youth of color are suspended, arrested, and issued court summonses for offenses as minor as writing graffiti on desks, refusing to take off a hat, or talking back to an officer.

Yet improvements can be made. A growing protest movement is forcing law-enforcement departments to implement anti-bias training so police can better understand and monitor their own behavior. Educators are starting to consider replacing excessive suspensions and arrests with strategies that build supportive relationships that can prevent conflicts in the first place. As our most recent report recommends, educators can analyze their disciplinary data for disparities, engage in frank conversations about race and their interactions with students, and test alternatives to suspension and arrest to address conflict and rule-breaking.

In particular, educators can work to build relationships between students and staff so that young people are approached as youth in need of ongoing support, not as threats. For example, at San Diego’s Gompers Preparatory Academy, a school previously plagued by suspensions, educators now address students who break rules by asking them what’s going on and what they need. Essentially, educators at the school treat young people as they’d treat their own kids. Gompers has vastly decreased suspensions and improved student attendance; it now even ensures 100 percent of its seniors enroll in college.

When educators and police officers relate humanely to the young people and communities they serve, they tend to stop overreacting to perceived threats. How might history be different if police had reacted, not overreacted, to Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown?

About the Authors

Mica Pollock is a professor of Education Studies and the director of the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence at the University of California, San Diego. She is the editor of Everyday Antiracism.

Tanya Coke is a distinguished lecturer and principal investigator for the School-Justice Project at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

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But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

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Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

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“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”